The invention relates to the automatic feeding of collar stays at a sewing station. In a typical construction of a shirt collar, a pointed collar stay is sewed between the inner and outer collar fabric panels. It is both time-consuming and tedious for the sewing machine operator to manually pick up a collar stay and place the collar stay in position for sewing. It thus becomes an expedient to have some means of automatically feeding a collar stay to closely adjacent the position of the collar in which the stay is to be sewn. A collar stay is normally made of a very thin material making it extremely difficult to pick up when on a flat surface.
Prior devices for feeding various articles have been developed which utilize suction to pick up the article and deposit it at a desired location. One such device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,849,847 which discloses a container capping apparatus which utilizes a vacuum applied to a suction cup for picking up a circular cap and, subsequently, ejecting the cap by applying pressurized air to the suction cup when in a discharge position. The suction cup is pivoted by means of a rather elaborate cam/linkage assembly from an inverted cap pick-up position to a cap discharge position as containers are conveyed therebeneath. However, this apparatus does not lend nor suggest itself to the feeding of articles such as collar stays which are comparatively thin and lightweight, particularly in view of the problems encountered with dispensing such articles from an overhead magazine. The suction cup device would not be readily effective for picking up elongated and narrow articles such as stays which present a much smaller surface for the application of a suction than the circular surface area of a container cup.
Another example of an article feeder device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,086,486 which discloses a hopper-type feeder having a feed chute for feeding buttons to an exact location of a sewing machine.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,483,833 discloses another button feeding attachment for a sewing machine which utilizes air cylinders for operating jaws to grasp the buttons and position the buttons in alignment with the needle of a sewing machine.